At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I have two jobs. One  as research faculty in computer science. In the second, I run a research analytics unit for the College of Engineering. The two roles complement each other although time will tell whether either have had broad impact. My work has been supported by awards from the National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, private foundations, and industry. At present, we are supported by an award from the Illinois:Insper Partnership and a grant from the NSF.

My research interests fall in an area bounded by computer science, informatics, scientometrics, the history of science, biomedical research, philosophy, and sociology. The ideas of the Kuhnian research community, center-periphery structure observed by Price and Beaver, and community detection in graphs come together-  in a 'computer-sciency' sense- in my work . The overarching research question is the structure of the global  scientific enterprise- both data artifacts and people. I am also interested in epistemic and post-epistemic misconduct- no shortage of case studies there.  

Before academia, I worked in industry, and, even before that, in the federal government. My PhD work examined signaling by the low affinity Fcγ receptor on human platelets and was  performed in the laboratory of Clark Anderson, MD. For a while after, I worked on proximal signaling by antigen receptors without much to show for it beyond a paper on negative signaling in B-cells and then my interests evolved towards research assessment; what is referred to as "meta-research" by some and "science of science" by others. My work partially overlaps with these two categories.

While in biology, I was fortunate to interact with a few outstanding researchers whose influence on me is evident even today. Particularly Clark Anderson and Andrew Chan but about a dozen 'inspirational others' were influential in various ways. Predictably, I also encountered a few unprincipled types who served to mark the other end of the spectrum. This calibrated experience awakened an interest in the health of the scientific enterprise in its mostly symbiotic relationship with society.

My principal collaborator is Tandy Warnow, also at Illinois. In this collaboration, we combine common and complementary interests in theory, methods development, and discovery. I also collaborate with David Bader from NJIT, Ananth Grama from Purdue, and Pablo Robles Granda from Illinois.

Recently, we've begun to work on an agent-based modeling project. Other active projects concern community detection and the generation of realistic synthetic networks at scale.